Ne-e-e-e-e-erd!

This morning came awful early

Posted on by Patrick

When my wife’s alarm clock went off at 5:30 AM, she said to me, “When did you get in last night?”

Me: “3:30.”
Her: “Yeah. I woke up at 2:30, and you weren’t in yet. I thought, Those idiots*, and went back to sleep.”

Those idiots were me and my cow-ork­er Craig, and the rea­son we got in at 3:30 AM was that we went to the city to see Neil Gaiman last night.

A cou­ple photos:

Neil Gaiman in Winterpeg

Neil Gaiman's green scrawl

I’ll prob­a­by have more to say lat­er. Right now I have to get back to work.

____

* My wife would like it point­ed out that she called us dum­mies, not idiots.

Contemplating a tattoo

Posted on by Patrick

…some­day. And so here’re the ones cur­rent­ly under consideration:

  • Two ravens, along with a quote from verse 80 of Hávamál: “Praise ice when over it”. (But ide­al­ly, trans­lat­ed into Icelandic.)
  • This — the cher­ry blos­som eight-sided mir­ror sym­bol of Kodokan Judo.
  • Eppur si muove — Galileo’s (prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal) rebut­tal to his forced con­fes­sion that the Earth does not move. It means “And yet it does move.”
  • “Lumi­nous beings are we, not this crude matter”.

Triple threat

Posted on by Patrick

I’m kind of a suck­er for cer­tain things:

  1. Images of galax­ies — I love the great whorls of stars that make up the vis­i­ble mass of the Universe
  2. The his­to­ry of sci­ence, espe­cial­ly physics and astronomy
  3. A clever title

So it was prob­a­bly inevitable that I’d check this book out of the library today:

I’ll let you know what I think when I’m done read­ing it.

Movie review: Moon

Posted on by Patrick

About an hour ago, the cred­its rolled on Moon. I went into the film know­ing very lit­tle: the only trail­er I’d seen fea­tured Sam Rock­well look­ing disheveled, and had Kevin Spacey as a HAL-style AI that com­mu­ni­cat­ed via a com­bi­na­tion of even, sooth­ing tones, and smi­ley faces.

I won’t post any spoil­ers here, but suf­fice to say that I quite liked the film. It had echoes of 2001: a space odyssey, Blade Run­ner, Gat­ta­ca, and Alien. All of those films are includ­ed in what I con­sid­er the canon of excel­lent sci­ence fic­tion, which should tell you some­thing about how thor­ough­ly I enjoyed Moon.

Sam Rock­well plays Sam Bell, com­ing into the tail end of his three-year solo stint as the human over­seer at a min­ing sta­tion on the moon’s far side. He keeps tabs on the unmanned rovers that comb the sur­face of the moon for He3, the fuel of the future.

Three years is a long time to be alone, and Sam’s look­ing for­ward to head­ing home to his lov­ing wife and young daugh­ter. He’s due — per­haps over­due — for a fur­lough. He might be going just a lit­tle tee­ny bit crazy. At the very least, he’s start­ed to see things, peo­ple, that can’t real­ly be there…

The movie explores lone­li­ness, ill­ness, loss and sor­row, anger, and evil. But every­thing’s done with a light touch. Some things are only hint­ed at, leav­ing the audi­ence to fill in the gaps, trust­ing that the audi­ence mem­bers are smart enough. Even the end­ing is sneaky: you have only a cou­ple sec­onds’ knowl­edge that the dénoue­ment has come, and then the cred­its are already rolling.

Moon is a refresh­ing SF film, one that encour­ages you to use your brain, to think around the cor­ners. It requires that you watch the film with your mind in gear, instead of in neu­tral. It’s a refresh­ing change.

Moon
…on IMDB
…on Rot­ten Tomatoes
…where I saw it

Next time (prob­a­bly): » Kata at the shore